The Islamic terrorist perpetrators
of the September massacres speak a language of hatred for America, the
West, Israel and the Jewish people: their mental structures and
world-views have striking analogies with Nazism. The attacks were
greeted with rapture in many parts of the Muslim world, including in the
Palestinian Authority. Muslim immigrants have carried these attitudes,
exacerbated by media coverage of the Middle East conflict, to their
Western hosts, resulting in an increase in anti-Semitic assaults on
Diaspora Jewish communities (especially in Europe).
Blame for Israel has been
ubiquitous throughout the Muslim world. In this context, the present
intifada has made it plain that Palestinian, Arab/Muslim grievances
against Israel cannot be satisfied by territorial and political
concessions. The antagonism lies far deeper and goes well beyond the
issue of “settlements”. It extends to the entire Jewish national
project. A culture of hatred has arisen which has become an end in
itself. This image of the Jewish state as the incarnation of
malignant evil naturally encourages the idea that all the Jews of Israel
should be wiped out.
One finds a growing readiness among
Muslims to believe that the Jews consciously invented the
“Auschwitz lie”, the “hoax” of their own extermination, as part of a
plan for world domination. Holocaust denial gives Arabs a radical
challenge to the moral foundations of the Israeli state, their scapegoat
for their inability to achieve political unity, economic development and
other goals.
In 2002,
clearly very little has changed in the basic repertoire of Islamic
Judeophobia, but it has become more widespread, intense, radicalized and
militantly religious in character. Daniel Pearl was executed because to
be born a Jew has become for many Islamic fascists, as it was for Hitler
and the Nazis, an a priori reason to be executed.